The Crossword Murder
Built as East Germany's largest new city after World War II, Halle-Neustadt was envisioned as a modern, socialist paradise for workers at the local chemical plants. It was built as the city of the future, and planners had imagined up to 110,000 people living in the carefully designed urban space.
Impersonal concrete tower blocks dominated the urban landscape of Halle-Neustadt in the early 1980s. The streets had no names at the time, only generic numbers. Addresses were simply the block number—residents lived in Block 483 or Block 318, and so on.
Young Lars Bense and his family lived in one of these massive, concrete structures that were carbon copies scattered across the planned community. Their home was in Block 483, an austere building that housed hundreds of families behind its monotonous exterior. It exemplified the efficient-but-bleak living spaces propagandized as model Soviet-style apartments.
Within this maze of dreary, identical blocks, it was easy to feel lost and anonymous. The lack of street names and individualized addresses stripped away personal identity from the environment. People almost became extensions of the buildings, lost in the standardized concrete cityscape.
* * *
It was a snowy Thursday in January 1981 when seven-year-old Lars Bense finished his first-grade classes for the day and planned to meet with friends to see a movie.
Lars' mother had given him money for a movie ticket, sending him off to meet friends. They planned to see the animated film Thumbelina, based on the classic Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, at the city center cinema.
Lars bundled up warmly against the swirling snow and headed out with his older sister, trudging along the icy sidewalks. They walked until the city center was in view a few hundred feet further, and Lars' sister felt he could manage the short distance alone. She turned back, trusting he would soon join his friends.
But the expected rendezvous never happened as the snow piled higher that afternoon. Lars' friends waited at the city center, toes numbing in the drifting snow, but Lars never arrived. Somewhere in that last stretch of frozen path, he had vanished.
* * *
When Lars didn’t arrive home after the movie ended, his parents began to worry. He was always punctual. They quickly called his friends, but no one had seen him since school. With dread clutching their hearts, Lars’ parents reported him missing to the Volkspolizei, the police of the former East Germany.
The police launched a search right away, scouring the snowy streets and apartment blocks late into the night, but little Lars was nowhere to be found. His disappearance gripped the community with fear. Had he gotten lost? Had there been an accident? Or had someone taken their beloved child?
The following days brought no answers, only agonizing silence—a week passed with no breaks in the case. Lars’ anguished parents waited by the phone day and night, desperate for news. But their bright, shy boy seemed to have disappeared into the icy winter.
Two weeks had passed when Uwe Theuerkorn, a nineteen-year-old railway worker, was making his rounds on long stretches of railroad between Halle-Neustadt and Leipzig. He was looking for frozen switches or network damage when an abandoned suitcase covered with snow caught his eye.
It lay scratched and weathered with broken latches, apparently having been thrown from a passing train. Curious, he opened the suitcase and stumbled back when he discovered what was inside.
When police arrived and opened the suitcase, they found the body of Lars Bense wrapped in a plastic bag and old newspapers.
An autopsy revealed that the boy had been severely beaten with a blunt object, stabbed several times in his upper body, and sexually abused.
* * *
The suitcase was tragically unremarkable—an ordinary, mass-produced piece of luggage. The brown pressboard case was a generic model sold in countless shops across East Germany at the time. Nothing distinguished the scruffy, battered suitcase as unique, making it impossible to trace its origin. It could have belonged to anyone.
The indistinct plastic bag offered no clues either. It was an unbranded, clear plastic bag like millions used in East Germany to package various household items. Nothing about the bag's design, color, size, or shape distinguished it as unique.
The only thing left in the suitcase were the crumpled-up newspaper pages. It was a standard edition sold at hundreds of newsstands throughout the city. However, one chilling detail caught an investigator’s eye—a completed crossword puzzle in the pages, filled out in green ink.
Unlike the generic bag and case, this puzzle presented an opportunity. The distinctively colored handwriting could potentially be matched to a killer. Where other physical evidence failed to identify Lars’ murderer, these cryptic answers scribbled casually across a page might provide the key.
* * *
Each person's penmanship has unique characteristics that develop over time. The longer an individual is out of school, the more their handwriting flows directly from the brain to the hand, bypassing engrained styles. Experts call this "brain writing."
The green-inked scrawl of the crossword held telltale hints about its author—the slant of the letters, spacing between words, and shapes of punctuation. These subtle, ingrained details weren’t exactly a fingerprint, but it was their best chance.
Upon closer examination, the green-inked handwriting had highly distinctive traits that experts determined could only come from one person. While completed in capital letters, it was written in a flowing, cursive style. But uniquely, wide gaps separated the different sections of the letters. Handwriting specialists claimed this irregular, as block cursive with exaggerated spaces was extremely rare.
* * *
From the horrific nature of the crime, investigators constructed a psychological profile of the perpetrator. The sexual assault and violent murder of a child indicated a pedophilic killer—one who would likely not stop at a single victim.
Profilers warned that this perpetrator would almost certainly strike again, compelled by sinister appetites. They were unsure if Lars was this killer's first victim, but they knew he would not be the last if they didn’t stop him quickly.
* * *
A handwriting expert named Wiesen convinced police to start systematically collecting writing samples from Halle-Neustadt residents for comparison. If they could identify the puzzle author, they might find the killer.
Investigators agreed and put together a team to analyze handwriting samples. Handwriting experts within the police and state security services cooperated with statisticians, mathematicians, and linguists.
The hunt for the killer sparked an investigation unprecedented in scale for East Germany. A massive task force was assembled to collect handwriting samples from Halle-Neustadt's nearly 100,000 residents, going door-to-door citywide.
Officers systematically visited every apartment block and house, requesting writing samples to compare against the cryptic crossword clues. Meanwhile, investigators combed through reams of documents from social security and city registers, searching for a match. Even trash was scoured for discarded handwriting.
This exhaustive search was like finding a needle in a haystack, but the stakes couldn't be higher.
Investigators cross-referenced passport and registry lists against officers verifying occupants door-to-door, checking for unregistered residents or people who may have recently moved. Traffic police, detectives, the fire department—all departments were enlisted, united in the urgent mission.
* * *
As the handwriting search continued, investigators pursued other angles as well. The suitcase used to transport Lars became a key focus. Police proposed displaying it in a shop near where the boy vanished, hoping the shock of seeing it might jolt someone's memory—or even the killer's conscience.
Initially, this idea met resistance, with some in denial that such crimes occurred in their community. But authorities insisted, choosing a central store in the residential blocks where Lars was last seen. For a weekend, the worn suitcase was exhibited under constant surveillance.
Investigators hoped its presence might elicit eyewitness leads on who had carried it, provoke telling reactions, or lure out the killer. But the dramatic effort ultimately proved fruitless—the suitcase failed to summon critical clues from the community. Yet police knew that even long shots were worth pursuing with lives on the line.
* * *
With all other physical evidence providing generic dead-ends, the completed crossword puzzle remained the primary hope for a breakthrough. Investigators mobilized assistance from a youth group to expand the handwriting sample pool.
The children were tasked with collecting residential wastepaper from assigned city blocks. This refuse was then sorted systematically by police, searching specifically for discarded crossword puzzles that could contain the killer’s writing.
* * *
After several weeks of analyzing the original crossword and the samples of thousands of collected handwriting samples, experts concluded that the handwriting most likely belonged to a middle-aged woman, not the male killer they had presumed. This breakthrough indicated that the puzzle’s author and the killer could be two different individuals.
* * *
Six weeks into the investigation, detectives enlisted expert assistance from Berlin's Humboldt University Criminalistics Department. They analyzed the evidence in an attempt to determine the likely location from where Lars was first abducted, and they built a psychological profile of Lars himself. They wanted to understand how he might have reacted to a potential abductor. Would he have complied with an authoritarian adult? Trusted a familiar relative or neighbor? Or had he been lured by a younger individual offering entertainment?
* * *
Despite new expert perspectives, investigators remained convinced that the key to finding the killer lay within the handwriting. But after five months of asking for samples, they had only collected them from a fraction of the city’s residents, and they were no closer to finding the killer.
Investigators then worked with the local newspaper to publish an easy-to-solve crossword puzzle, offering a prize to attract participants. The handwriting samples poured in, but there were still no matches.
* * *
Eleven months after Lars’ murder, Block 398 was scheduled to collect handwriting samples. As officers painstakingly went door-to-door through the massive apartment structure, one door knock went unanswered. A neighbor explained that a woman in her 40s lived in the vacant apartment, but she was a seasonal worker who spent the winters working as a waitress in a busy cafe near the Baltic Sea.
Regardless, investigators would need the woman’s handwriting and worked with officers in the area to get her sample. It was handwriting sample number 551,198.
Amazingly, the woman’s handwriting bore a striking resemblance to the writing from the crossword puzzle. When handwriting experts analyzed the sample, they were 100 percent sure it was an exact match. Investigators couldn’t believe that, after countless hours and more than half a million samples, they finally had a potential match.
* * *
However, by the time they had made the discovery, officials in the Baltic Sea town where she was staying informed investigators that the woman was gone. She had traveled south to Werder, East Germany, on vacation with her twenty-year-old daughter.
At 5:30 the following morning, two investigators from the Lars Bense task force arrived in Werder and knocked on the door of the woman they only identified as “Ingeborg G.”
When Ingeborg and her daughter Kerstin answered the door, they were genuinely surprised to see officers there. Ingeborg explained that they had left Halle-Neustadt on January 11 that year and had known nothing about the boy’s disappearance and murder. Kerstin, too, had been waiting tables out of town when the boy went missing.
When officers showed her the crossword puzzle, Ingeborg confirmed it was indeed her handwriting. When she was shown a photo of the suitcase, she recognized it immediately as her own.
After these revelations, however, Kerstin spoke up. She told officers that her boyfriend, Matthias, had been alone in their flat during that time, and he’d had access to the suitcase and the discarded newspapers.
Kerstin told officers that she had left to work in another town on January 13, but Matthias stayed behind for a few days until he met up with her again. Kerstin said her boyfriend had strange sexual fantasies involving violence, which frightened her.
* * *
Nineteen-year-old Matthias S. was arrested on November 17 at his job site. He remained calm and composed for hours during his interrogation, saying very little. However, when presented with the evidence against him, he confessed. Matthias explained that he’d fantasized about killing a child for as long as he could remember.
He told detectives that on January 15, he saw the boy walking alone through the snow toward the city center. Matthias took his opportunity, offering the boy a toy car. He then enticed Lars to follow him to his girlfriend’s apartment, where he sexually assaulted him.
Afraid that Lars would expose him, Matthias knocked the boy unconscious with a hammer, put him in the bathtub, and continued beating him. He stabbed him repeatedly, stuffed him in a plastic bag, and placed it in the suitcase. He explained that he stuffed the suitcase with newspapers to soak up the blood.
Matthias then purchased a train ticket to Leipzig. During the journey, he waited until the train reached a remote, wooded area between the cities, and then he heaved the bag out of the train window.
* * *
Finally, the trial of Matthias S. began in the summer of 1982. Charged with murder and sexual abuse, Matthias testified to fantasies of killing children stemming from childhood trauma. Disturbed sexual appetites also became apparent in his testimony. The prosecution painted him as a pathological predator who was too dangerous ever to be released.
Ultimately, the Halle District Court concurred. They sentenced Matthias to the maximum penalty—life imprisonment with no possibility of parole. Additionally, his civil rights were revoked, reflecting the egregious brutality of his crimes.
* * *
After German reunification in 1990, Matthias' case was re-examined under new juvenile sentencing guidelines. Although eighteen when he murdered Lars, he would have been tried as a minor in West Germany.
So, in 1991, prosecutors applied for a retrial, which was granted. The 1992 sentencing under juvenile law imposed a maximum of ten years of detention as a minor, with subsequent incarceration in a psychiatric hospital.
After his reduced juvenile sentence, Matthias underwent psychiatric treatment until 1996. He lived in an assisted living facility for another three years before being fully released in 1999.
After his release, he did his best to live anonymously, but reports tracked him to Magdeburg, Germany, where he later had a wife and son. Matthias died at age fifty on January 15, 2013—thirty-two years to the day after he murdered Lars Bense.
